RomeCODE and JulieTEST (Startup Crossed Lovers Book 1)

by Jade Bitters

  “They asked for more help in the Esplanade,” said Amy. “I’ll make sure the companies are getting together. You know how much I abhor corporate rivalries.” Amy raised a brow but Miranda seemed to be entirely focused on her phone, refreshing over and over for some reason.

  William walked over between the two women from behind. “Chop chop, let’s get to it,” he said. “It’s already three. I thought it was only two. Miranda, I’m going to need you to check on the preparations in the Presidio room. If we need to hire some more help, do it, Thisbia can afford it.”

  “Go, Miranda, go!” said Amy. “And get yourself an espresso, William. This is about to be the longest twenty-four hours of your life.”

  “I doubt that,” said William. “What, Amy, you think this is my first rodeo? I’ve never missed a scheduled day of work, and that won’t start, not even after this event.”

  “Yes, yes, you’ve always been quite the workaholic,” said Amy. “But the thing with workaholics is they actually have to be working, don’t they? So get yourself some caffeine, stat.” Amy and Miranda left together to check on the respective areas. This convention center felt too small and too large at the same time.

  “That damn woman,” cursed William, as four engineers approached him with a cart filed with cables and boxes. “What is it?”

  “We’ve got the dev kits, but I don’t know where they want them,” one of them said apologetically.

  “Mission and Pacific Heights, the rooms, obviously,” said William, rubbing his temples. Why had he skipped his massage yesterday? He should have shut Juliet down and just went to his weekly appointment. “You,” he ordered to the man wheeling the cart. “Make sure that the kits are set up and ready to go. Talk to Peter, he’ll know how to have them arranged.”

  “I don’t need to bother Peter, I’m not an idiot,” said the man.

  “Of course you are, you’re an engineer,” said William. “It’s almost dawn...and Paris will be here soon. At least, if everything goes according to plan. I got a text from him a few minutes ago.” William heard the sounds of the megaphone downstairs, telling the attendees to organize themselves into a line. He pulled out his phone and texted Miranda and Amy: Make sure Juliet’s up and ready ASAP. I’m going to show Paris around. Hurry, he’s already almost here.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Act Four, Scene Five

  “Honey,” called Amy, rapping like a raven at Juliet’s chamber door. “Hey, sweetheart! Juliet! I bet she’s asleep, she had so much to do yesterday. Hey, darling! Dollface! Beautiful dreamer! You’re still asleep? Well, you get your sleep now...you won’t get any for a long time, Paris will keep you quite busy. Sorry, another joke. But goodness, wake up! You’re really asleep, aren’t you...guess I’m going to have to come in, honey! Juliet! Darling, sweetheart! If you don’t get up soon, I’ll ask Paris to come in and rouse you, and wouldn’t that be embarrassing?” Amy jiggled the doorknob: it was open. She went into Juliet’s room and saw Juliet lying on the bed, looking up at the ceiling, her head always in the clouds. Juliet must’ve been listening to music loudly again. That had to be it, that’s why she hadn’t heard her! Amy chuckled to herself: Juliet idiosyncrasies were her way of grounding herself. Amy could understand that.

  Amy walked over to the bed. “Juliet, you’re still in yesterday’s clothes...and, you’re not awake. Juliet,” she said, shaking her ward. “Juliet, Juliet, wake up. Miranda! Miranda! Miranda! I need you in here! Stat! Juliet’s not waking up! On today, of all days! Hurry, get an engineer. William! Miranda!”

  Miranda rushed into the room and saw Amy holding Juliet the way Ivan had held his son. “What’s all the commotion?” she said.

  “It’s all over now,” said Amy, unable to look directly at the girl whose head she was cradling against her ample bosom.

  “What’s going on?” demanded Miranda.

  “Look, see for yourself,” said Amy, motioning over Juliet’s body with her free hand. “This ruins everything.”

  “This can’t be happening,” said Miranda, actual tears held back by her attempt to act like less than an human. “Juliet, you’re...you’re my everything! Please, wake up, or else everything we’ve been through has been for nothing. William! William! You need to see this!”

  “What on earth is taking so long?” asked William, turning the door and looking down at his phone. “Paris is already at the event, why isn’t she ready?”

  “Because...she’s broken,” said Amy. “Something happened and she’s not turning on. This day couldn’t get any worse.”

  “Couldn’t get any worse? She’s all I have, Amy,” said Miranda. “And now she’s gone or broken. She’s never not turned on before.”

  William dropped his phone on the floor and didn’t care that the screen shattered into a million pieces. What was a phone’s screen as compared to the future of a multibillion dollar company, which had always delivered products on schedule? “That...that can’t be! Let me see her!” William took a knee, the first time Amy had ever seen him take one, and took Juliet in his arms, pressing down on her clavicle with one hand.

  A set of lights in green and red and blue popped up...but most of them were red, and flickering. He checked his phone with his other hand, opening up the app he kept hidden as a generic game, “BlockBusterBasher”, but upon pressing elements on the main menu in a certain order, the oversaturated game app disappeared, leaving way for the minimal app, the most powerful app that Thisbia had developed so far: JULIET TEST. “You’re...you’re right. Her systems are failing, and they’re draining her power. She’s disconnected from the dorm server, the company cloud, and I can’t access her via my phone. She’s gone, before we even got to take her to her own launch event. Dead on arrival.”

  “This...this can’t be happening,” said Amy, looking at William actually showing something he cared for the first time in his life. She’d seen the way he looked at Paris and the way he looked at Juliet was like a father looking at a child, a child he’d ignored for all too long, who had finally left, never to return.

  Miranda sighed. “William, what are we going to do?”

  “I have no idea, Miranda,” said William, gently resting Juliet back down on the bed and taking a seat in the chair by Juliet’s desk, his head hung and in his hands.

  Lawrence straightened his blazer as he entered the apartments with Paris, chatting with the man about how he’d rediversified his stock portfolio. He hadn’t been to the Thisbia dorms since last summer, and although he knew what he was going to see, he had to make sure for himself that Juliet had followed the instructions to a T. “Are you all ready to head to the convention center?” asked Lawrence as he turned the corner, followed by a gaggle of interns who had heard that the legendary coder known solely as The Architect was in the building. He saw the three older employees and the looks on their faces and knew his plan had worked...so why did it feel like he’d failed?

  “She’s gone, and not coming back,” William said to the man that used to work on the Juliet project, one of the original people who had worked on the project, whose company had been acquired by Thisbia. Lawrence had tried his hand at working at Thisbia but he’d quit suddenly last autumn and poured all his energy and funding into the coffee shop.

  “Paris, this...this isn’t good. This was the day you were supposed to provide a keynote for the launch. And there she is. She was our everything, and now...she’s nothing more than an empty doll, full of dreams. That’s all we have left now: our stupid, foolish boyhood dream, of building something that we could call ours, the daughter we could never have. I might as well end my own life, because what is there to live for other than Juliet? Nothing ever goes according to plan,” said William, looking at Paris, who could swear he saw the reflections of that Meteora sky in William’s eyes, the shadow of the past they’d shared.

  “Is this what I came out here for?” asked Paris. “A broken doll?” He’d funded this project ever since Juliet was just the focus of one of Lawrence’s papers in his artificial i
ntelligence class. To think, the technology for Juliet had been theorized by an undergraduate at an obscure state school, not even in a thesis, and now, here he was, with the prototype that had become a reality mere years later...and his shiny new toy couldn’t be turned on.

  “This is the worst day in Thisbia’s history,” said Miranda. “In my life. She was all I had too: I have no husband, I had no child, and I felt nothing close to what I had with Juliet with any of the other interns. She was so perfectly programmed, the perfect employee, the perfect daughter...but apparently, not the perfect android. This was all I had, Paris, and you were going to take her away, but at least she’d be happy on the island. At least...at least she’d be safe. After today, there was no telling what would’ve happened when other companies learned about the CPUlette technology.”

  “I was there when you first booted her up,” said Amy. “I was the one that made sure she had a life off campus, that she never felt like she was anything less than a real human girl, or I guess, as she constantly liked to remind me, a woman. All those memories that were programmed into her system, I made her feel like they were real, and really, did it matter if they weren’t, given that they made her feel normal, and happy? What would she think, if she knew she was really only almost two, not twenty-two? This isn’t how this was supposed to end. She was never supposed to have an end. Robots aren’t supposed to die.”

  “There must have been a virus, or some sort of error, or a worm, or maybe hackers,” said Paris. “Because Juliet...nobody told her, right? She had no idea that she was anything other than normal, she had no idea that she was special. You made sure of that, didn’t you, William?” Paris shot his ex a look, raising a brow, and William shrugged his shoulders. “But the code giveth and the code...the code taketh away. There’s no justice, is there? Stupid consumer apps get millions in funding, and yet, technology like this...she’ll never see the light of day, not again.”

  “Caches to caches, rust to rust,” said William. “On today, of all days. Why did it have to happen today, on the day of her launch? Oh, Juliet, Juliet...if I could give my right hand to bring you back, I’d give my whole damn arm, because you...please, just wake up, Juliet. We’ll do all those things you wanted to do, me and Miranda and Amy and you, all together, every last one. If you don’t come back, I’ll leave Thisbia.”

  Was this what he’d really wanted: to bring down a man who had taken the company he’d built from scratch in his dorm in college? That’s what Lawrence thought he’d wanted, but watching a grown man cry over what was essentially the death of his daughter was not as satisfying as he expected. It was the opposite of satisfying, the kind of opposite that knotted his stomach. “Get a hold of yourself, William!” ordered Lawrence. “All your threats won’t bring her back. You still have her files in the cloud...and now, she’s in the cloud too. At least all those issues she’s had are over. Inevitably, Juliet would eventually have to be shut down, or she’d crash, or something would happen, rendering her systems inert. What did you want for her? To be some sort of plaything for rich men like Paris? That’s what you wanted for her, and now, she’s finally happy...or at least not sad. And that’s not enough. You smothered her. You kept her in an ivory tower, under lock and key, and even when you finally let her out, you kept her on a leash. At least she had this summer, to be happy, to be human. So stop your whining, and take her to the launch event. Show her off as planned, and use footage you took of her in the launch presentation. Have an intern whip something up, isn’t that the Thisbia ethos? We’re all going to miss her, but you’re going to have to get it together, William. You’ve got a company to run.”

  “Everything used for the launch event will be used, we’ll just have to alter the presentation,” said William. “We’re going to have to go all out on this one to make up for the fact that the lady of the hour isn’t exactly going to rise and shine. Our keynote is going to have to focus on her specs. We’ll use the luxury and enterprise presentation, not the one focused on household consumers. There won’t be any other activities, just the press release. It won’t go as planned...but the show will go on.”

  “Then get going. And you, Miranda, head out too. Paris, you know the drill,” said Lawrence. He’d always kept his distance from Thisbia proper but given that they still paid him highly as a consultant for the Juliet project, and the coffee shop wasn’t exactly a money maker, he knew exactly what he was talking about, given he’d basically spoon fed everything to Thisbia, from management of product management to details about how the launch should go. “Get her into her packaging, the prototype packaging will do...if you still kept it. If you weren’t able to boot her using the app, don’t take her to the offices, just straight to Moscone. At least she looks presentable.”

  The intern behind Lawrence said, “At least we can go back to our rooms now, and put away our laptops.”

  “That’s right, boys, pack it up,” said Amy. “The hackathon isn’t going to be going on.”

  The intern shrugged his shoulders. “Unless you figure out how to turn Juliet back on.” The fact Juliet was an android wasn’t exactly a secret at Thisbia, at least, within the company: it was just one that was held behind a non-disclosure agreement that interns signed without reading, like enthusiastic, over-eager clockwork.

  Peter shoved by the mop-topped young man. “Oh, interns, stay. Or rather, go: the event will still happen. Please, please go.”

  “Why?” asked the intern, all-together too nosy and in the way.

  “Because...that’s what Juliet would have wanted,” said Peter, looking at the girl he’d been texted about. He’d always tried to keep his distance from Juliet, knowing what she was, and feeling weird about working with a doll, but in her frozen state, she was oddly more human that she’d ever been before, because she was able to fail. “Please, just...just program.”

  “Are you sure that’s really appropriate?” asked the intern uncomfortably.

  Peter didn’t turn from the bed where Juliet was lying. “Did I stutter?”

  “No,” said the intern, wanting to head back to his room.

  Peter traced his eyes over Juliet’s silicone body, which he would have never thought was anything other than real human skin if he hadn’t noticed how she never had acne, or scrapes, or bruises, things he wouldn’t wish on her but would expect her to experience. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

  “Why not?” asked the intern, who was lucky Thisbia didn’t test its programmers on how well they took clues.

  “Because this is an event I helped organize, and if you don’t go, I’ll mark this in your fucking file,” said Peter, his voice remaining calm and flat.

  “You’re not my boss,” said the insolent intern.

  “Your file. Marks. Sound good?” said Peter. “I could just make sure that you don’t get college credit for this internship when your college calls next week. So get your ass to the convention center, open your laptop, and start coding.”

  “I’ll just code ‘Hello World’ over and over,” said the intern.

  “Please, Peter, don’t joke about our credits,” said a girl from behind the intern.

  “If you don’t like me kidding around, you better do as I say, and act like a good employee,” said Peter, his eyes still tracing lines over Juliet’s form. “What’s that koan, again, the one from the Jargon File? ‘A novice was trying to fix a broken machine by turning the power off and on. The Engineer, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: ‘You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.’ The Engineer turned the machine off and on. The machine worked’...why do they say that? ‘The machine worked’?”

  “Because...that’s what machines are made to do,” said the male intern.

  “That’s not the answer I need right now,” said Peter. “What about you? Don’t think I can’t see you, girl.”

  “I guess people say ‘the machine worked’ because they work to make the machines,” said the girl softly.
>
  Peter scoffed. “That’s another stupid answer. There’s someone behind you, isn’t there? What do you think, kid?”

  “I don’t know,” said the extra intern. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, sorry, I forgot, you go to a state school,” said Peter, although he also went to one, knowing that statement would hurt. “I’ll tell you why. It’s ‘machine worked’ because before Juliet...machines didn’t live. ‘You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.’”

  “What a weirdo,” said the first intern to the girl.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said the girl. “The hackathon’s going to start and we might as well go. What else is going today anyway, except for everything? We’ll wait for the keynote and take as much free food as we can.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Act Five, Scene One

  The Austin heat wasn’t getting to Romeo’s head, although he stared upwards at the ceiling, at the ceiling fan spinning, as he thought about Juliet and about how soon, he wouldn’t have to pretend that the fan above him was the same as the one in her room, how he wouldn’t have to pretend her was with her in her room, how he wouldn’t have to pretend that everything was okay.

  I had the weirdest dream last night, again...and that’s a good sign, he thought to himself. All I can think about is her, and that’s all I can think about. I had the weirdest dream: she was trying to reach me, but couldn’t talk to me. I couldn’t understand her. But...it wasn’t a nightmare. She kissed me and I woke up and everything was okay. I was with her, in SF, and we were happy. The only thing better than thinking about Juliet...is being with her.

  Romeo’s door opened. The friend he was staying with, a Pyrymyn temp who had worked in San Francisco for his spring semester and for a few weeks into a summer, came in and sat on the beanbag across from Romeo. “Do you have news, from San Francisco?” asked Romeo. “What is it, Barry? Do you have news from Lawrence? How is Juliet? Is Ferdinand okay? How is Juliet? Please, there has to be something, anything.”